For a given cryptocurrency or other blockchain application, proof-of-work provides intrinsic security in the algorithm itself that makes it unlikely that someone can attack the network unless they have more than 50% of the computational power of the network under their control.
This makes sense and works once the network has a considerable size, but every network has to start somewhere, and when a new application is born and the number of miners is still very small, it would seem very easy to outpower the network to insert fraudulent transactions and still be the longest chain of blocks.
Is there a way to mitigate this risk?